MDA’s Chia

December 2007

By Mansha Daswani

With its strategic location in Asia, Singapore is positioning itself as the region’s media capital, and leading that initiative is the Media Development Authority of Singapore (MDA). The regulatory body’s mandate includes bolstering the country’s entertainment landscape, and as part of its efforts it has been actively supporting the production and export of local content. From issuing licenses to new Singaporean broadcasting services to hosting pavilions for local production-and-distribution companies at content trade fairs around the world, the MDA is working hard to put the tiny market on the global media map. Through co-production agreements with markets like Australia, Korea and Canada, the MDA has enabled Singaporean outfits to work with producers from around the world and gain international exposure. Within the local market, meanwhile, the MDA is driving technological innovation through various research-and-development initiatives and Singapore is now among the most advanced markets in Asia, with a broadband penetration of 71 percent. The MDA’s CEO, Dr. Christopher Chia, speaks with TV Asia Pacific about the organization’s efforts.

TV ASIA PACIFIC: You’ve been participating at MIPTV, MIPCOM and other TV markets for several years now. Have you seen Singa�porean attendance increase?

CHIA: In any one year we go to about 25 markets. There were 24 companies [from Singapore at MIPCOM]—that is up on previous markets. And we were there with about 100 programs. That’s quite a big jump. Factual and animation continue to be the strongest genres. [Our goal is] to continue to make more and more deals.

TV ASIA PACIFIC: What are you doing to boost the export of Singaporean drama or other genres?

CHIA: Korea is very well known for drama, and we have four separate agreements there: with the Korean Film Council, the Korean Broadcasting Commission, the Korean Broadcasting Institute and KOCCA [Korea Culture and Content Agency]. [Most] were signed within the past 12 months.

We’ve also concentrated on raising content financing. People are finding that if you come to Singapore, you can raise financing fairly easily, you can get a show made on a collaborative basis and then get it distributed worldwide.

TV ASIA PACIFIC: You recently opened up the Singaporean broadcasting landscape with a new IPTV license for Singapore Telecommunications. How has the launch of its mioTV pay-TV platform affected the market?

CHIA: There’s great excitement. They have [several] high-�definition channels on IPTV, and that’s not so common. The second thing is, it created new buzz. According to the mioTV people, they’ve reached their target projections for the first few months. If anything else, in our part of the world, it lets people take a look at how different platforms can coexist: free to air, cable and now IPTV. There’s a VOD element as well.

TV ASIA PACIFIC: What are some of the other new-media initiatives you’re supporting in the Singaporean market?

CHIA: We have a project with MIT to create a games-development laboratory. It’s a five-year project and we are sending hundreds of people to MIT and they’re sending people across to Singapore, to create new ways of developing games. Games and animation are both digital media, so the skills are transferable. We are concentrating a lot on the R&D aspect�to help people make that content faster and deploy it faster. We’ve also got a project called i.Jam. From that we expect, within the next two or three years, to generate about 2,000 small micro-projects. Any one of them, we hope, can become a larger project at any time.

We have now 100 megabits per second broadband streaming. And I think that’s slow. Now we’re thinking about the next generation, at least 1 gigabit [per second]. There is a lot of space for growth.

TV ASIA PACIFIC: What kind of expertise can you offer other countries in the region?

CHIA: We have been positioned as a showcase, as an example—you can come here and see it. We’re generally about two to three years ahead of the market. It doesn’t take very long for a small country like Singapore to deploy [new technology]. For example we have free Wi-Fi [across the country]. That’s happened in the last year. We’ve been an early deployment site for many technologies. Many countries don’t want to be the first, just in case they make a mistake! And we were able to get the whole ASEAN region to adopt the DVB-T [Digital Video Broadcasting-Terrestrial] standard.

TV ASIA PACIFIC: How is the development of mobile content progressing?

CHIA: The mobile-content space is not coming up as quickly as we’d like it to be. It’s the simplest thing on earth to take large-screen content and shrink it to a small one, but how do you create a viable business proposition? But 3G penetration is very high. Any new subscriber can go straight to 3G for about the same price. One year from now it will be, what’s not 3G?

TV ASIA PACIFIC: What are your plans for the Asia Media Festival?

CHIA: To keep expanding the number of people that come. For the last six years it has been growing. The major Hollywood distributors have been coming and expanding their presence. In fact, for last year and this year, it’s fully booked up, so we’re thinking about new formats to gain more space [next year].